The love of God for the world, the love for humanity and creation, is not for a perfected human family or world. No, God’s desire and affection is for the real, present versions. God loves all just as everything and everyone is right now, despite all the imperfections, sin, and corruption. This is the great affirmation of familiar passages such as John 3:16. God does not love us for who we might be, or will be, but as we are. The world for which God undertakes his extraordinary demonstration of self-sacrifice is the same one which is treacherously ungodly, in diabolical opposition to him, and thoroughly set on destruction.
For if while we were enemies we were reconciled to God by the death of his Son, much more, now that we are reconciled, shall we be saved by his life. Romans 5:10
Some have said that God’s revulsion for sin means he cannot bear for sinners to be in his presence. They are wrong. If this were true, then either Jesus did not come into this world or Jesus is not God. Think about that. How can God the Son be around sinners when some claim God the Father cannot? There is only one God . . . and he ate with sinners.
It is a distortion of the gospel to claim that God loves the world but cannot tolerate having sinners in his presence. The idea that true holiness cannot fellowship with sinners seems more at home in the thinking of the Pharisees than in the actions of Jesus. However, this false depiction of God is a necessary premise if one wants to change the crucifixion from a demonstration of love to an act of redirected divine wrath. The cross should be the symbol of selfless love, not a reminder of how much God hates sinners and what God would be right to do to each of us.
I suspect that only when we ourselves cannot fathom loving the unlovable do we misconstrue God in our own image, alleging that God is repulsed by our sinfulness and he separates himself from us. The gospel proclaims the opposite: that God rushes toward us, becoming one of us, precisely because of our sinfulness!
If indeed God loves the world as it is, and not simply as it will be through his working and grace, then we ought to love the real world and real people too, just as they are and not only when they are “good”. I have no problem loving the lovable. God, however, loves the unlovable and calls me to the same deep compassion and affection which I am to express in concrete acts of service and selfless prioritizing of the needs and interests of others.
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